Kristin Reeves

Directing

Kristin Reeves

Kristin Reeves has shown her interdisciplinary work internationally in museums, galleries, theatres, art events and festivals such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Microscope Gallery, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Antimatter [Media Art], Crossroads, The Chicago Underground Film Festival, European Media Arts Festival, FLEX, Revelation Perth. Reeves has also collaborated in over 20 live multimedia productions including projects staged at Steppenwolf Theater, Chicago; The Boiler, Brooklyn; The Granoff Center, Providence. She was the Co-Artistic Director for 2020 That One Film Festival. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Intermedia Art at Ball State University in Muncie, IN.

Acting credits

Behind the camera

Parts 1-7 [When moving the body forward, the term for the movement depends on the body part being moved.] poster
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Adapted and refined for the AAFF, seven interstitial videos mix content from the program’s discrete films and (adapted) performances to create a feature-length experience. During these events, video loops with live narration from the artist provides context and a first-person point of view of the screened films. Every show is unique—including this one.

Parts 1-7 [When moving the body forward, the term for the movement depends on the body part being moved.]

2025

Body Contours poster
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Make movies in your mind, feel the soundtrack, and drift away from your body for the win. Trauma overloads the brain’s signal. Meaning becomes a sensation outside of the reach of language and logic. Brain signals jam and loop. Produced through a Signal Culture artist residency, using educational films.

Body Contours

1999

Music of Desire poster
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When intimacy couples with dysfunction; feel the sensation of becoming suspended between pleasure and a reverse soundtrack of desire. Produced through a media art residency at Signal Culture using real-time analog video processing tools and found media. Sexual dysfunction and disruptions to pleasure are common symptoms of trauma. High and low-level therapies can include music and body work. I converted the filmic body into a controlling signal, which was then applied back onto itself. The process a model of trauma; the material sources, point to the need for therapy; clinical and pop.

Music of Desire

2017

What Is Nothing (After What Is Nothing) poster
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Using found educational films, direct laser animation and nine-projectors, I attempt to realize the multifaceted materiality of nothingness through the eyes of those who may be most vulnerable to the void.

What Is Nothing (After What Is Nothing)

2021

THREADBARE poster
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A fever-dream processes childhood memories of medical exploitation.

THREADBARE

Je Ne Sais Plus [What Is This Feeling] Studio Version poster
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A digital re-staging of an expanded cinema event, built on 27 10-second 16mm film loops that were constructed from optically printed found footage and direct laser animation techniques. An obstacle course leads to [DESTINY.] I meditate on the body’s materiality and the struggle to achieve personal sovereignty within its bounds.

Je Ne Sais Plus [What Is This Feeling] Studio Version

2025

CPS Closings + Delays poster
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CPS Closings & Delays takes as its subject the controversial decision by the Chicago Board of Education, under the auspices of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, to close 50 public schools in 2013. Kristin Reeves shot all 50 schools with a 16mm camera a year later then distressed the footage of the buildings in post-production using laser animation and bleach.

CPS Closings + Delays

&Human poster
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Pharmaceutical companies were granted a six-month patent extension in 1997 for any drug that was tested on children. I went to a park to stage a body politic art/protest pop-up, critical of the US Department of Health and Human Services’ support of for-profit pediatric research. The kids at the park take over!

&Human

2011

No artwork available
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Bodies hold secrets that are confessed in examination rooms through expert interrogation. Truth-telling clinical media has the authority to answer what is found.

The White Coat Phenomenon

2012